In Starcraft 2, scouting is essential to winning the game. A advanced player will alter their build orders and other strategies based on what their foe is doing.
If you truly want to be a Diamond League player, you have to develop and sooner or later master scouting. If you’re good at scouting you will be able to reveal your opponent coming long before they are at your door and have no hope of being successful, which will give you the ability to retaliate their offensive strike in a victorious manner.
Scouting is probably most essential for the Zerg, because they are so very specialized. An effective overall tactic is to continually harass your enemy while you also scout him. This strategy permits you to identify the enemy forces while delaying them, and also lets you figure out which soldiers you should spawn so you can counter him. Zerg’s can use Mutalisks combined with Zerglings to constantly harass an enemy while spying on him.
If you can begin with your spying at the start of the game, you will discover whether your enemy plans on rushing you. One example would be Terrans that have not completed their Barracks yet, but have already built a working refinery. This probably indicates that you will get rushed by Reapers. Another instance is a Protoss enemy that has constructed 2 Gateways before they have erected their Cyber Core, and you find they have no vespine gas. This means you will probably be ambushed with a Zealot Rush.
To make sure that you aren’t rush attacked have your Overlord do beginning game spying, not your Drones. However, it can be a smart idea to dispatch in a Drone scout if your Overlord is not able to locate the opponent’s headquarters, especially in close air positions with 4 player maps. A surefire strategy that can be initiated against every race in the war is to send in 1-2 Drones to your enemy’s base to look around early on in the game. The moment your Drones are under the threat of being terminated, create an extractor inside the enemy base. Each and every time the enemy makes a move to destroy it, cancel it out and just make another one. By executing this tactic, you will slow down your enemy’s tech tree by tying up their gas. It is important to note that you need to abort the Extractors extremely fast in order to prevent a 75 mineral loss – the termination of both your Drone and the Extractor.
Eric Bator has been practicing Starcraft 2 since its beta release in Feb 2010. He is a top ranked Diamond League player who has perfected his Zerg Build Orders and other Starcraft 2 techniques by playing with this Diamond Gamer review.